A Fond Farewell as Dean Marc Rubin Retires

If you’re a student who hangs out in the Forsythe Commons or the Atrium around lunchtime, there’s a good chance that at least once, you’ve been offered candy by Marc Rubin during his “office hours”. The dean of the Farmer School made it a habit to leave his office once a week with a bag full of chocolate and chat with students, asking them about their classes, their plans for the weekend, plans for the next semester, or plans for their future.

But Marc’s impact and legacy at the Farmer School of Business dates back to before the school was known as the Farmer School of Business. He arrived as an assistant professor of accountancy in 1990, 15 years after he graduated from Miami University with his accountancy degree.

He became the chair of the Department of Accountancy in 2003, a role he held until becoming the interim dean of the Farmer School in 2017. Marc also was president of the American Accounting Association and a member of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business Accounting Accreditation Committee.

So it may come as a bit of a surprise that being an accounting professor wasn’t on Marc’s radar when he was in college. “I was an accounting major but I intended to go to law school. In case I didn’t get into law school, I would have another profession to fall back on. In my senior year, I was admitted to a number of law schools,” he told Poets & Quants for Undergrads last year. “But in my junior year, I got to know the accountancy departmental chair who I had a couple of classes with. He called me in once to ask me if I knew what had happened to a friend and that’s how I got to know him and began visiting with him regularly. I eventually started thinking: ‘Dang, he has a cool job! He’s a great teacher, he gets to talk with students and hang out on a college campus with college kids with all this gorgeous architecture. If I can do that for the rest of my life, that’d be so cool.’ That experience planted the seed of going into higher education in my mind.”

“I’ve been pretty blessed because I went into this pretty naively. If someone had told me this would be my career path, I wouldn’t have believed them. I’ve gotten to teach in Luxembourg, Korea, Southeast Asia and visit alumni in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Florida and many other places throughout the U.S. I have also been fortunate to travel to many countries during my career including China, Taiwan, Ireland, Cyprus and Australia,” he said. “If you had told me that I’d be president of the American Accounting Association one day, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

Now, 30 years after returning to his alma mater, Marc is retiring at the end of June, his legacy living on among the students he taught and the faculty, staff, and business leaders with whom he worked. “To this day I speak of the Financial Statement Analysis class that you taught as my favorite college course,” Brian Oatway, 2014 graduate and EY transaction advisory services manger said. “What you did with Farmer and the accounting department was amazing.”

“He was my all-time favorite professor and I’ve been so lucky to keep in touch with him over the years,” said Deborah Kaufman, CFO at Triangle Securities Wealth Management and 1993 FSB graduate.

“He went way above and beyond in his service to the Farmer School. We should be very appreciative of the contributions he’s made,” said George Bennett, partner at Talisman Capital, 1975 Miami graduate, and longtime member of the Farmer School Business Advisory Council.

So after 30 years at the Farmer School and more than 40 years of teaching, what does the future hold for Marc Rubin? “We’re going to move up to where our daughter and her husband and our grandkids are – that’s Chicago,” Marc told David Schwab on the Beyond High Street podcast. “I’d still like to be involved with Miami. I’ve had a lot of students over the 30 years that I’ve been here and some of them offer me ideas of how I could be involved in some of their activities, whether it’s being on a board of directors or doing some consulting work. My wife’s pretty sure I will not just sit still.”

“We owe him a huge thanks and gratitude for leading the Farmer School of Business to the new heights. His passion for the school, students and his competitive spirit to position FSB higher and higher will be greatly missed,” said Dinesh Paliwal, President & CEO of HARMAN.

We couldn’t have said it better. b